Product Details
 | The Lord of the Rings: Mines of Moria |
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Product Description
The 2007 PC MMO Game of the Year returns with an all-new breakthrough title! The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria drops you into the dark majesty of the world beneath Middle-earth. Explore a truly vast underground environment like you’ve never seen before. Battle the terrors of the Nameless Deep with new legendary items that evolve and grow in power as you do. Experience the dread and wonder of Moria as one of the new Rune-keeper and Warden classes. Achieve greatness as you seek to claim the knowledge and power lost for generations! This Complete Edition includes the original title Shadows of Angmar, all content updates, plus the Mines of Moria expansion.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #280 in Video Games
- Brand: Turbine
- Model: 884299000046
- Released on: 2008-11-17
- ESRB Rating: Teen
- Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
- Format: DVD-ROM
- Dimensions: .40 pounds
Features
- Live the Legend: Join the only massively multiplayer online game based on the extensive and beloved fantasy universe of J.R.R. Tolkien and adventure through renowned places like the Shire and Bree, and now Moria, and the dark heart of the Misty Mountains.
- Reach level 60 with thousands of character customizations: 4 races, 9 classes, 10 professions, 7 vocations, + over 1,000 titles, skills and traits. Over 3,500 monsters & over 500 authentic landmarks in nearly 100 million square meters of Middle-earth!
- Explore 3 new regions & 12 expansive areas of Moria. New graphics technology brings this underground realm to life like never before, with stunning vistas crafted by the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm. Delve deeper into the darkness.
- Design and create legendary items as renown as Bilbo’s Sting! Your hero’s gear will evolve and grow in power along with you, leading to truly unique end-game items!
- Fight for the dark side with monster play, the revolutionary monster vs. player (PvMP) combat feature, now with 5 more ranks, Artifact Control, and a live online leader board to showcase your achievements.
Customer Reviews
An exceptional expansion
Turbine did a great job with
this expansion.
They added two new classes: the warden and the
rune keeper. I was happy with concept behind the classes.
The
warden is a mix between the champion(melee AOE DPS), and the
guardian(tank). Great solo class! They are officially a tank class, but
again, they have decent DPS as well. They have a "gambit" system. What
this is, is when you click skills in a certain succession, you will come
up with a certain special skill to use. It's good to memorize the
gambits and what skills get them to pop up. Some heal, others do extra
damage, still others give better blocking, etc...
The rune keeper
is a fairly advanced class. I thought it was a lot of fun, but there is
a bit of a learning curve - especially if you are new to the game. That
said, once they come into their own, they can be great ranged
DPS(second to the hunter), and great healers(second to the minstrel).
There is a range bar that goes both ways. The more it climbs one way,
the more the skills get powerful. The reverse is true as well though. If
you are blasting things with your DPS skills, your heals will be
weaker(some will not even be available) - and vice versus.
They
overhauled the graphics a bit. I noticed they looked sharper right
away.
I like the new legendary items. Even if you are one who
likes to race to the max level, you can still continue to advance
because the items also level up as well. As they level they get more
powerful.
Next is the new areas themselves. I have only been
playing a few months, so I am not an authority in this area. That said,
many of my kinsmen(guild mates) have been there. They say the graphics
are really awesome, and give you a real sense of being in an underground
ancient civilization. They also commented on how enormous and how epic
the place felt.
As far as PvP - or PvMP in this case, They
revamped and did some balances to the Moors. The moors, for those who
don't know is the Ettinmoors. There is a instanced area where players
fight against monster players and also do quests/objectives in a very
large valley. The valley is a lot bigger than AV (Alterac Valley from
WOW).
I want to point out one thing that was true before the
expansion, and continues to be now: the crafting. The crafting in this
game is very well thought out. It's not perfect(besides we all have
different definitions of that anyway), but it is fun and relevant. I can
buy items that were crafted that are pretty much in the same ball park
as PvP and raid items. This makes for a decent player economy. It's not
as complicated as EQ2, but more so that WOW, IMHO. A good happy medium
if you will.
Anyway, as a long time 3+ year WOW player who
recently moved on, I can really appreciate this game, and the great job
they did on the expansion.
If you are a fan of the Lord of the Rings,
or simply love MMO's with a good but not stifling story, then this is a
good place to invest some time into.
*edit 2/27/09*
I
still love this game. In fact the soon to come book 7(free content
update) will open up all of Lothlorien! They wanted to release this
content with the expansion, but decided to hold off as they only wanted
to release it when it was refined and done well. I can really respect
their attention to detail. As for Moria, I am loving it! It really is
epic and well done. There are many different "environs" in it so you
don't get bored with the same ole same ole. If you haven't yet gotten
it, or were thinking of getting back into the game, now is a great time
to do so!
The Little Unknown MMO That
Could....
Just wanted to add a quick
review of this online game. Awesome, beautiful, extremely well
thought-out, very polished. I tried this game during late beta and
couldn't get past the "noobie" area ~ thought it was boring... Well I
was in between games a few months ago and saw LOTRO had a 14 day free
trial and gave it a second look. Again was bored during the beginning
noobie section but I forced myself to play through it... sooo glad I
did! This game really starts to shine at around level 10 and only gets
better as you level-up.
I would say the player base is perhaps a
little older than the average MMO and is top notch! I have asked
questions in the /advice channel several times and have always got a
respectful and helpful answer. Try that in EQ2/AoC and chances are you
will get flamed =(
Some servers are more populated than others...
I started (unbeknownst to me) on a newer, sparsly populated server and
ended-up switching to another server after about a month. Just go to the
forums and do a search to find the more populated servers.
I
have played MANY MMO's over the past decade (showing my age a bit there ~
lol) Even met my Husband in one. To compare your MMO likes/dislikes
with mine: my favorite MMO was DAoC. WOW just never appealed to me and
is one of the few MMO's I have not tried. LOTRO is perhaps the closest
thing to DAoC EXCEPT it's "RvR" is considerably different.
Anyway,
there is a lot more to this game than meets the eye at first, give it
enough time (and research on their forums) and you will probably not
regret it. They add free (and worth while) content regularly.
LOTRO
is the best kept secret MMO out there!
A
Fantasy MMO, but for Grown-Ups
I couldn't help but think
that, over and over, when I made the jump from World of Warcraft (WoW)
to Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO). If you've never seen the original
Japanese Iron Chef show, when one of the judges describes what they're
eating as being "for grown-ups," it usually means that it's restrained
in seasoning, elegant, subtle. A fruit ice cream that gives you more of a
floral, fruity taste than a sugar rush, or an expertly-grilled cut of
meat that requires you do nothing more than sit there and let it melt in
your mouth. Art, in a word, the sheer beauty of which is beyond the
comprehension of children.
It's sad, in a way, that it's
impossible to talk about a modern Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO)
game without talking about WoW. In essence, WoW more or less fails to be
the very best at any one thing in order to be second best at almost
everything. It's kind of like McDonald's. It's probably not going to
ever be your favorite place to eat, but you'll probably eat there more
than any other single place in your life. It's the game that everyone
can agree on. When the topic is MMOs, it's a point of reference; the
question isn't, "how good is the game," it's, "how is it, compared to
WoW?"
What makes LotRO really shine is not that it does things in
unique ways, but that it does that with a purpose, and it does it
extremely well. Everything is about serving the story and the
atmosphere. I cannot stress that enough. More than any of the myriad
MMOs I've played to date, LotRO is an unabashed worshiper of the art of
telling a good story, and telling it well.
Right off the bat, as
you're making your character, you are not just told to make a "good,
appropriate fantasy setting name" for your character -- you're given a
primer on who those people are and where they come from, as well as a
long sample list of names, suffixes, and prefixes to work with. Some
MMOs will just pay some lip service to the idea of story-compatible
names, for example, saying that certain character names are
inappropriate, and then giving hypocritically mind-boggling examples.
WoW says that you shouldn't make a character named "Technotron," but
before very long, you'll come face-to-face with the quest mob (enemy
character), Techbot. LotRO makes character creation fun, participatory,
and dare I say it, even creative. You'll be given some food for thought
as you make your avatar, with hints like, (quoting from memory) "Elven
women often have names ending in -riel, -wen..." and so on.
The
realistic bent to the style of the whole game makes the fantasy elements
seem almost that much more extraordinary. As you're choosing skin,
hair, and eye colors for your character, notice that the relatively
limited palette for each selection is itself limited by where your
character hails from. Will you be a dark-haired son of Gondor, or a
red-headed horse-lord from Rohan? Every little thing serves the story,
the atmosphere.
You don't have Hit Points (HP) and Mana, you have
Morale and Power. On the surface, it sounds like a cheap distinction,
but it goes deeper than that. Your Morale (roughly equivalent to HP) can
be capped by powerful evils that inspire Dread, for example. When this
happens, not only does your Morale total drop in proportion to just HOW
evil the big bad you're fighting really is, but the whole screen rushes
towards you and blurs for a moment, before settling back into place with
an even MORE muted color palette. It's really wonderful theater,
brilliantly designed and flawlessly executed. These little touches are
everywhere in LotRO, and they add a level of polish that makes the odd
bit of dodgy dialogue stand at attention and read like Tolkien.
Turbine
must be given credit for their very bold art style. It's bold in a
counterintuitive way; the artwork itself isn't highly stylized, in fact,
it's as nearly photorealistic as it can be while still depicting a
fantasy setting. The palette is restrained, drab... real. This relative
dullness allows the game to really highlight visuals in the same simple
way that reality does, if you let it. Run up the side of a hill in
LotRO, and find yourself in a field of gently swaying white flowers, and
you will stop, and just look. It's beautiful, and there is absolutely
nothing remarkable about it.
Water effects are similarly
mesmerizing, but the little bits of the stage that peek through here and
there are more obvious with the water's surface than anything else. It
handles reflectivity of objects near the surface relative to your point
of view, meaning that if you are standing next to a bright copper node
and you angle your point of view so that it sits before a distant pool
of water, the water will appear to reflect the copper node, which is of
course impossible. It is one of only two egregious examples of broken
illusion I have found yet in this game; the other was an invisible wall I
ran into while swimming down a stream.
I've expressed my love of
random map dungeon crawls in other game reviews (like Alien Syndrome
and Phantasy Star Portable), and an MMORPG (MMO Role-Playing Game) is
nothing if not a truly enormous dungeon crawl. The problem with that is
often how to get the user to understand where to go next without talking
down to them. In the latest update to the game, which was released
about a week after I started playing, you can select up to five quests
to track with some text on your screen. With each of those, you can
click the little ring icon next to the text and examine the quest log
entry for that quest, in case you need to re-read some of the content
and figure out what to do next. As far as where to go next, this is
handled with a simple arrow pointing towards the nearest quest-related
area for the quest(s) you are tracking. It's not quite talking down to
the player, because the arrow points straight in that direction, and
does not account for changes in terrain or elevation, what kind of
hostile forces you may run into on the way, and so on. It's a
brilliantly simple solution, though I am occasionally annoyed that I
haven't figured out how to select which quest I want to get directions
to, as it's not always the one that's closest.
Customization is
not quite as deep as it is in WoW, with no user-created add-on support
(to my knowledge), but what's there is certainly serviceable. So far,
I've found myself missing only the auction-house tracking add-on, as I
now have to try to guess at the value of my goods to sell to other
players, and can't build a long-term reference of the market on my
server. You can scale the entire user interface (UI) to your liking, and
move the components around by entering a UI-editing mode with a simple
key command, and then keying back out of it when you're satisfied with
where things are.
MMOs are often about loot, which means you need
space to carry things that you pick up. LotRO starts you off with all
the bag space you will ever have, which is good and bad. For the
beginner, it's great, especially if you're familiar with WoW and the
very limited bag space you start out with. As you progress, I imagine
it's quite limiting, because you can never replace your starting bags
with much more generous ones. You do have immediate access to a vault,
and you can purchase additional vault space at certain levels.
Combat
seems, in a general sense, pretty standard; you target (or get targeted
by) enemies who are near enough, you fight them or you run away, and
it's basically Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots with 3D models until someone
runs out of steam and drops dead. Between just the two classes I've
played with so far, there is plenty of variety in the specifics of how
this happens. Combat in modern MMOs seems in large part to be how to
make each class its own minigame when the battle is joined. All I've
seen in LotRO so far convinces me beyond any doubt that I will have a
very unique (and likely enjoyable) experience as I make my way through
all the classes.
My Minstrel uses ranged song attacks and can't
take very many melee hits, but she also has strong heals, so she's
reasonably survivable against single enemies of a similar level. The
Warden has a unique UI widget to handle "gambits," LotRO's word for the
combo-and-finisher system of play they've developed. As your Warden
progresses, more gambits become available to them, and the number of
moves you can drop into the gambit widget grows. The gambit widget fills
automatically as you perform any of your basic types of attacks -- a
quick thrust, a shield bash, or a battle cry, to start -- and once
you've created a combination out of at least two of them, your finishing
move becomes available, with enhanced effectiveness that relates to how
the gambit was built. For example, you may use your shield bash twice,
and then clear the gambit with a finishing move that improves your block
rating temporarily.
Another given for the modern A-list MMO is
crafting -- give players components, tools, etc. and allow them to make
their own loot. LotRO again goes for the unique factor by combining sets
of the basic trades (which you cannot select individually) into careers
made of three parts. For example, the Armourer (British spelling
abounds) is a Prospector, able to mine and smelt ore, a Metalsmith, able
to fashion their ingots into chains, plates, and ultimately, armor (I
mean "armour"), and a Tailor, able to take prepared leathers and create
various lighter forms of clothing, as well as the connective pieces used
in the heavier gear you can fashion with your Metalsmithing. At first,
this system feels limiting, but in reality, it's no more limiting than
any other MMO that imposes limits on how many tradeskills you can take,
and it's another example of the atmospheric, story-centric approach that
LotRO has taken to the MMO.
Still one more truly singular aspect
to LotRO that stands with one foot outside of the game world is the
developer's relationship with the user community. They flat-out ask the
community what feature(s) they want most, and have actually changed the
course of their development plans in order to satisfy those user
requests. The biggest example so far is the inclusion of player-owned
housing and guild halls. While this was always a feature intended for
inclusion at SOME point in the game's future, my understanding from what
I have read and heard to date is that it was the user community
clamoring for it that caused Turbine to put it at the top of the feature
list, and implement it more or less immediately (that is, before just
about anything else). If you really get caught up in the expertly
crafted world that Turbine has made for you to play with, you can
literally move in to your own house within LotRO.
You can even
join with your friends for some impromptu in-character jamming, as
equipping any of the various instruments (even for non-Minstrels) will
let you type /music and then press numbers 1-8 to play notes in an
octave. You can shift them up or down with the ctrl or shift keys, and
there's even some polyphony. It's clunky if you want to take it as an
instrument, but this sort of feature is everywhere in LotRO, and the
complete effect is pretty amazing. For a few silver pieces, you can even
establish familial relationships between characters. The in-game
support for roleplayers is fantastically deep.
Sometimes it seems
like they've gone overboard in skinning the game to make it really
unique. They've renamed just about everything but the mailbox and the
Auction House, like "Fellowships," instead of groups or parties,
"Kinships" instead of Guilds, and so on, but it cannot be said that
they've gone about their mission half-heartedly.
If you felt like
WoW was too cartoony for you, but you shuddered when you thought back
to how obfuscated everything was back in Everquest I: The Anniversary
Edition, give LotRO a crack. It's not just a good-enough fantasy MMO to
distract yourself between WoW expansions. It's an elevation of MMO
development to art, and it's not likely you'll find anything quite like
it anywhere else. The one exception, and you can be glad for it, is that
like most major MMOs these days, there's a free downloadable 10-day
trial. If you can't wait to upgrade, like me, your 30 free days that
come with the game itself are just tacked on to the 9 trial days you'll
have left when you realize you just want to subscribe and dive in
headfirst.
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